Monday, 3 April 2017

2nd April 2017. GW/MW-002 SOTA Activation visit.

Today's visit was a trip to Great Rhos in the county of Powys Mid Wales, I left my home QTH Telford at 05.50 a.m. I arrived at my car parking area Grid SO 15707 65560 at 07:10 a.m. took 5 minutes to sort out all of my gear and headed south towards Grid SO 16483 63681 which I arrived there at 07:43 a.m. from this location you need to head east up the steep track for about 1200 meters then cross the fence as I could not see any stile's anywhere. The next 600 meters were probably the worst as I could not see any track's, the whole area was covered with heather and bog's which made the going tough.

The 1st photo is the start of the steep walk up and the photo does not do the climb any justice. From photo 3 you can see all of the heather and believe me there are a lot of boggy areas in there as well.

I arrived at the summit at 08:13 a.m. well ahead of schedule and set up my 2M and 20M dipole, I managed to use a few bungee cords to support my fishing pole and my walking poles to tie off the guy ropes. I started off on HF and could hear lots of contest stations but there was room for me in the QRP section of the band so I spotted myself and started calling CQ. This was a bad day for myself and SOTA as I could not get any reply's at all, after about 20 minutes of trying I reverted to 2M and started calling. I had 6 QSO's in about 15 minutes including our club Chairman M0KZB (Eric) my first SOTA contact with Eric.

At 09:30 a.m. I decided to try HF again and found a clear frequency and again spotted myself and started calling, this time I was lucky and managed one QSO with OE6GND (Gerhard), after another 20 minutes on 20M and 17M I had no luck so decided to try 2M with a hand held that I was trying out and managed a further 3 QSO's. A total of 10 contacts in all I was happy but would have preferred more on HF.